This Week in the Voice: The Police Tapes, Vol. 4

June 16, 2010

In this week’s Village Voice, our writers may not run restaurants, but they definitely have seen their fair share of rats. Graham Rayman’s fourth installment of his epic look behind closed NYPD doors, The Police Tapes, runs this week, and now we learn who the officer was that took these recordings, and what the NYPD did to him when he tried to clean them up.

On the cover of the Voice this week: the hard-working men and women of New York’s venerated culinary institutions, be they of one or five stars, often share a common bond most diners never get to see: their tats. This week, we take you past the house table, into the kitchen, where Keith Wagstaff puts the heat on what NYC’s most badassed chefs are wearing under their whites in Kitchen Ink: Chefs Talk About Tattoos.If you’re appetite for something cool hasn’t been whet by the men and women cooking this city up, elsewhere in Food, we’ve got a few things that will: Robert Sietsema ventures out to Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where he visits two Turkish restaurants — Halikarnas and Marmaris — to see how some of the city’s supposed Ottoman Empire excellence measures up. Meanwhile, Sarah DiGregorio takes the A-Train to Harlem, where she reunites with the food of former Allen & Delancey chef Ryan Skeen, who took to Twitter before parting with that gig to request of the world: “Get me the fuck out of NYC.” He apparently didn’t get past Harlem, where DiGregorio travels to see how Skeen’s cooking away his ennui at 5 & Diamond.

There’s more getting under the skin in Film, as legendary Voice film critic J. Hoberman looks for The Killer Inside Me, where he finds a disturbingly bloody flick. It’s tangentially opposed to following the young men of Restrepo, a behind-the-frontlines documentary of war from the soldier’s perspective. Then there are the boys who are anything but men, as Jonah Hill and John C. Reilly in Cyrus, a dark comedy about a son who’s too attached to his mother, who enables him. And then there’s Oscar-winner Tilda Swinton gets her Kate Chopin on by being unhappy about having a (supposedly) really, really good life in I Am Love.